Category Archive
‘Factories’: 125 Posts

With most disputes over the ownership of the former Packard plant on East Grand Boulevard in Detroit resolved, the new owner of the plant told the Detroit Free Press this week that he intends to begin cleanup soon and eventually restore some of the plant with the help of Albert Kahn Associates, the firm named for the man who designed the plant in 1903.

Though Peruvian developer Fernando Palazuelo paid $405,000 for the 40-acre factory complex – vacated by Packard in 1956 – at a Wayne County foreclosure auction in December, he’s since had to clear a few hurdles to begin work on the deteriorating and vandalized buildings.

Then, earlier this summer, a number of Detroit news sources reported that Palazuelo owed the county more than $92,000 in delinquent taxes. At the time Palazuelo said that he believed his lawyers had taken care of the back taxes, but the Detroit Free Press noted that he only paid the county those back taxes after he resolved the dispute with Cristini.

That leaves just one last hurdle, a dispute over a 4.5-acre parcel within the Packard plant complex that includes half of the much-photographed pedestrian bridge crossing East Grand Boulevard and that was not included in the county foreclosure auction. Palazuelo is reportedly working with the city to resolve that claim.

As for his plans, Palazuelo said that he intends to clear debris starting next month and redevelop some of the plant into mixed commercial, industrial, and residential uses. Specifically, he told the Free Press that he plans to restore the pedestrian bridge, four-story administrative office building, and a nearby courtyard. He has also mentioned the possibility of hosting a Detroit Symphony Orchestra performance in the ruins of the plant as well as securing the return to the plant of a section of concrete wall allegedly stenciled by graffiti artist Banksy. Palazuelo said that the total cost of the renovation could take decades and total $300 million, partially paid through tax credits.

“If the market reacts positive, we will do it in 5-7 years,” Palazuelo said in June. “If the market does not understand our proposal, it will take more than 10 years.”

The factory dates back to Packard’s 1903 move from its birthplace of Warren, Ohio, to Detroit. Designed by Albert Kahn, who became one of America’s foremost industrial architects (his works include Ford’s Rouge plant and GM’s headquarters of 1919), the East Grand Avenue plant was one of this country’s earliest examples of reinforced concrete construction, and was once admired as one of the most advanced factories in the world. Packard left East Grand for South Bend in 1956, after consolidating its operations with Studebaker. The factory had a variety of paying tenants over the past several decades, the last of which left in 2010.

UPDATE (7.November 2014): In a community meeting this week, Palazuelo and his company, Arte Express, said that the renovation work on the Packard plant will take between seven and 15 years and cost as much as $500 million.

The former Jacksonville Ford plant, as it looks today. Photos by Chris Brewer, unless otherwise indicated.

Editor’s note: This story comes to us from Chris Brewer of Jacksonville, Florida. Chris is a contributor to the Florida Times Union newspaper, and serves as senior editor of Automotive Addicts.

Long gone are the nearly three-quarters of a mile of conveyor belts. A couple of inches of water have pooled up in parts of the facility, the roof leaking in a way that the whole building feels more like a movie set than a once-thriving automobile factory. Today, the former Ford plant on the banks of Jacksonville, Florida’s, St. John’s River sits largely abandoned, belying the fact that it was once a key component of Ford’s early manufacturing empire, employing hundreds of local workers to build Model T automobiles.

Like much of the city’s downtown, the Ford Motor Company’s long-vacant 165,200-square-foot facility lies in dilapidated ruin. Over 80 years have passed since the last Model T rolled off the assembly line; the majority of the building’s windows are shattered, the rotting wooden doors hanging freely from corroded hinges. A boarded-up section of the building has been repurposed as a wooden pallet storage facility, making it underutilized, to say the least. Even in decay, a portion of the protected historic monument, symbolizing America’s manufacturing prowess, remains useful and profitable.

The plant sits in the shadow of the Mathews Bridge, linking downtown to the suburbs.

On the day I shot the images for this story, the wind was whipping off the St. John’s River, passing through the old manufacturing plant in audible gasps, as if it were trying to form the words to tell the brick, concrete, and rusted metal’s story. I’m not sure if it was an actual voice, or simply my mind rehearsing the research I had done in the city’s main library archives, but I strained to listen, and here is the tale.

With $28,000 on hand and 12 investors on board, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company on June 16, 1903. Quickly establishing a reputation as a world leader in the mass production of manufactured goods, Ford built a world-changing company around the central belief that paying employees enough to afford the products they built was good for business. By 1914, Ford was offering a five-dollar-a-day wage to assembly line workers who met certain conditions, more than twice the amount of the automotive giant’s competitors. Working at one of Ford’s factories meant a successful lot in life, and loyalty to the company was generally fierce.

In 1909, inspired by the voluminous unobstructed interior of Packard’s assembly plant in Detroit, Henry Ford commissioned Albert Kahn Associates, which had developed a new style of construction that employed reinforced concrete in place of wood as the primary building material, to design Ford’s automotive milestone-producing Highland Park plant. Not only did Ford’s new plant create a facility that allowed the company to perfect the moving assembly line, the implications of Ford’s manufacturing genius revolutionized the car industry forever. The Model T that took twelve and half hours to build in October of 1913, only took an hour and a half by New Year’s Day, 1914.

The demand for Ford’s vehicles was far greater than the maximum production levels attainable at the Highland Park plant, and in 1917, Ford again tapped Albert Kahn to design the mile-and-a-half-wide, more-than-a-mile-long River Rouge facility in Dearborn, Michigan. Employing a workforce of approximately 100,000 employees (some estimates are as high as 120,000 during WWII), River Rouge became the largest manufacturing facility in the United States. However, as anyone who has met with an investment banker knows, putting all of your eggs in one basket creates a vulnerable situation. A single catastrophic fire could mean financial devastation. Coupled with the ever-increasing need for more automobiles, the Ford Motor Company asked Kahn to design smaller satellite factories in Jacksonville, Florida, and 16 other cities around the globe.

In 1923, Ford purchased the former Bentley Shipyards property from the city of Jacksonville for $50,000. The company began construction of the River Rouge-inspired facility on January 23, 1924, completing the 115,200-square-foot, $2 million complex on August 29 of that same year. The plant was immediately recognized as one of Ford’s leading facilities for the production of the Model T, which it began building on November 26, 1924.

The 10-acre site included a river-fed 75,000-gallon water tower built specifically to combat fires, a screen house, an oil house, and a power plant equipped with two 225-horsepower boilers that produced the factory’s required 500 kilowatts of electricity.

The Kahn-designed plant was built upon 8,000 wooden piles girding the raised concrete piers that held the reinforced concrete floor. Interestingly, there is now a section of the factory floor where the concrete has broken away to expose the wooden foundation. To my eye, they appeared as long railroad ties, slightly eroded but still holding the original hewn square shape. Kahn’s design incorporated hundreds of feet of energy-saving skylights that provided the employees working along the plant’s 3,500 linear feet of conveyor system with natural heat and light. The assembly plant had three railroad sidings, the largest allowed 50 rail cars to access the building for deliveries and to take away the completed vehicles.

The west wing of the building held the factory offices, a parts department that served as a supplier for the entire state of Florida, and an Italian Renaissance-inspired showroom to display the latest Ford and Lincoln vehicles to the public. The combination of Florida’s endless summer, the location on the pristine St. John’s River, and the cool ocean breezes that gently wafted the smell of fresh paint, a tangible hint to the magic and mystery of the plant itself, attracted would-be buyers and curious window shoppers from all across the Southeastern United States.

The beauty of Kahn’s skylight-intensive design is still evident.

Initially capable of producing 125 cars a day, the plant quickly outgrew itself. In an effort to keep up with the automotive purchasing needs of an ever-growing southeast region, Ford acquired 10 adjoining acres in 1925 for $114,000. The additional land allowed the Jacksonville facility to add 50,000 square feet to the plant. Completed on November 13, 1926, the now-165,200 square-foot factory quickly began producing close to 200 vehicles a day. Records show that by the end of 1927, Ford had built 74,908 automobiles, mostly Model Ts, and 14,821 trucks at the Jacksonville plant.

The facility was retrofitted in 1928 to allow mass production of Ford’s new Model A. At peak production, the plant employed more than 800 workers and continued in full operation until 1932, when the Great Depression put a chokehold on the auto industry and negated the need for the smaller satellite plants’ additional production capacity. Ford continued to use the building as a parts distribution center until 1968, abandoning the facility altogether for new operations on Jacksonville’s Westside and in the newly expanding Orlando area.

The once-bustling docks around the plant are now largely silent as well.

Over the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the magnificent building became the home of various companies, including World Cars (Toyota), a European car-import firm, and a van conversion business. Eventually, the once-proud plant became little more than a storage facility for construction businesses, and, most recently, a wooden pallet manufacturer.

Sadly, the plant is used for little more than pallet storage these days.

Occasionally, rumors circulate of would-be developers looking to convert the location into luxury apartments and condominiums, commercial office space, or a marina. One proposal suggested transforming the location into a cruise ship terminal, but the plant seems to deny all requests. Perhaps too proud to admit it is time to move on, she stands just below the Mathews bridge, wistfully eroding away, a silent reminder to all who enter the heart of Jacksonville of the city’s once-thriving manufacturing past.

Matchbox cars roll off the assembly line in 1965. Still image from video.

Computer-aided design and manufacturing has decreased time to market with the modern automobile, and the same can be said of today’s Matchbox cars. In 1965, however, the process was far more time consuming, as this film from the British Pathé archives illustrates.

Matchbox cars exploded in popularity during the 1960s, and by 1965 Lesney, parent to the Matchbox brand, was producing 80 million scale cars per year, leading to £1 million in annual foreign investment. Like their full-size counterparts, each early Matchbox car began life on a drawing board, where a designer would strive to capture as much detail as possible in the original artwork. From these renderings, large scale models were built from hand-carved wooden components, again with an emphasis on accurately preserving the features of the original automobile.

Next, molds were cast from these wooden bucks, but the end result was still five times larger than the finished product. To scale the molds down, technicians would operate a pantograph milling machine “with the skill of a surgeon,” gently carving a metal mold in the appropriate shape and size to accept the molten metal used for casting. Once the test casts were approved, the new design was given a green light for production.

Like real automobiles, each Matchbox car received multiple coats of paint and repeated trips through an oven to dry and harden the finish. Details such as wheels and interiors were pressed in place by line workers, and the final product was placed on a conveyor belt for final inspection and packaging in individual cardboard boxes. Today, such a labor-intensive design and manufacturing process is unimaginable, but in the mid-1960s, it was simply business as usual.

Despite consistent demand for Matchbox products, Lesney declared bankruptcy in 1982, a victim of the poor economic climate in Britain. American toymaker Universal acquired the rights to the brand, which it sold to Tyco in 1992; Tyco was later bought out by Mattel (manufacturer of the rival Hot Wheels line), which has continued to enjoy success with the Matchbox name.

* Reader Chris Finch pointed us to a pretty amazing collection of photos that DetroitUrbEx put together, showing a number of old Detroit car factories superimposed by photos of the same factories – or in many cases, the same locations sans factories – nowadays.

* Overdrive magazine last month presented the story of restorer Bob Dean’s 1939 Peterbilt Model 260, which is apparently the world’s oldest known complete Peterbilt and which is currently on display in the Peterbilt headquarters in Denton, Texas.

* Diseno-Art this week ran down five concept cars from the 1990s that maybe should’ve been built, including the 1995 Chrysler Atlantic concept above.

* Finally, name the best-selling American-built car in the United States since the late 1970s. It ain’t powerful, and it ain’t comfortable, but the Little Tykes Cozy Coupe still gets plenty of kids into cars long before they can drive. The BBC has more on its development and impact.

Own a vintage Mercedes-Benz, and repair or restoration can be booked through the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center. Similar classic vehicle services are provided by luxury brands Porsche, Ferrari, BMW and Aston Martin, and on August 1, Jaguar adds itself to the list of manufacturers catering to owners of other-than-new vehicles.

The announcement came buried in a press release discussing Jaguar Land Rover’s newly formed Special Operations Group, which is best broken into two segments for clarity. For those interested in new (or future) vehicles, the Special Operations Group will create both limited production and entirely bespoke models for clients and will operate out of a dedicated Technical Center to be constructed near Jaguar’s current headquarters. For customers with vintage Jaguars, the Heritage Vehicle Workshop will be based out of Browns Lane in Coventry, the site of Jaguar’s headquarters from 1951 through 2005. Though much of the Browns Lane facility (including the former assembly line buildings and the Jaguar Heritage Museum) has since been razed, the location is still described by Jaguar as “its spiritual home.”

Lightweight Jaguar E-Type under construction.

The first project to come from Jaguar’s Heritage Vehicle Workshop will be the six continuation Lightweight E-Types, announced in May and set to be unveiled later this year. In addition to vehicle recreations and continuations, the Heritage Vehicle Workshop will also provide service, restorations and parts to owners of vintage Jaguars, and will be tasked with parts sourcing and re-creation as well. The venture officially begins on August 1, though it’s a safe bet that work is already underway on the Lightweight E-Types to be assembled around the remaining six chassis numbers.

Just as the Special Operations Group will concentrate on new production models for both the Jaguar and Land Rover brands, heritage services will be available for Jaguar and Land Rover owners alike. Yet to be determined is whether the Browns Lane Heritage Vehicle Workshop will service both brands, or if Land Rover will construct a facility of its own for historic vehicle servicing and restoration. From a corporate perspective, demand for Jaguar parts and restoration is almost certainly greater than demand for Land Rover restoration, and hence a more profitable venture to begin with.

UPDATE (4.August 2014): Jaguar has announced that it will debut the first of the continuation lightweight E-Types later this month at this year’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

A line of nearly completed Morgans awaits final assembly. All photos courtesy Jan M. Smith.

Of all the world’s automakers, few have resisted change quite as much as Britain’s Morgan Motor Company. When Hemmings Motor News reader Jan M. Smith toured the automaker’s Pickersleigh Road factory in June 1975, his Kodachome slides showed factory images that would have looked remarkably similar (dress code aside) in the 1960s, the 1950s, the late 1940s or perhaps even 1936, the year Morgan introduced its first four-wheeler.

The slides speak for themselves, but wherever possible we’ve included Jan’s thoughts on the impromptu tour. Officially, Morgan didn’t offer plant tours to visitors in the 1970s, but as a “Yank” and former Morgan racer, Jan was encouraged to roam the factory freely and ask any questions of “the lads” as they assembled Morgan automobiles. For times when an accent was a bit too thick for Jan to understand, his then-wife Jenni, a British citizen, was on hand to translate.

Jan’s ex-wife Jenni, outside the entrance to the factory offices. Jan describes the office as “beat up, with old racing posters on the walls.”

Though a designated National Historic Landmark, Ford’s historic manufacturing plant in Highland Park, Michigan, today stands as a shell of its former glorious self, many of its buildings either razed or abandoned. Thanks to the efforts of a community action group, however, two of its remaining structures, including the only building left that fronts historic Woodward Avenue, now move one step closer to preservation.

When Ford opened the Highland Park plant in 1910, its sheer size was nearly incomprehensible, as no other industrial complex in the world came close to matching its scale. Sprawling over 120 acres, the vast complex included a foundry, ample manufacturing space, a power plant and administrative offices, and it existed (at first) solely to build Henry Ford’s Model T. Between 1910 and the end of Model T production, the plant produced an impressive 15 million automobiles, growing even larger as Ford’s needs for space increased.

The administration building and garage in its prime.

In 1917, the Highland Park plant also began producing Fordson Tractors, and as this business grew, so did the number of buildings on site. Two years later, in 1919, an executive parking garage was constructed, complete with a steel truss roof and ribbed glass ceiling panels for natural lighting, followed by a new four-story administrative building, completed in 1921, to support the growing Fordson business. The Fordson office building faced Woodward Avenue, and though dwarfed by the rest of the Highland Park Plant, its brick curtain exterior walls dressed up the reinforced concrete construction favored by architect Albert Kahn.

Inside, the administrative building featured decorative plaster throughout the first floor and on upper-floor corridors, as well as a grand marble staircase at the building’s east end, joining all four floors. Mosaic tiles graced the first floor, greeting visitors with a bit of elegance lacking in many other buildings throughout the Highland Park complex.

Today, both the Fordson office building and the adjacent executive parking structure stand abandoned, their interiors and exteriors damaged by time, neglect and vandalism. Both were placed in the National Register of Historic Places and named as National Historic Landmarks in 1989, and the Fordson office building currently stands as the Highland Park complex’s public face, thanks in part to its Woodward Avenue frontage and to the sign that identifies the location as the “Home of the Model T” (even though the Highland Park site was the second location to construct Model Ts).

The Fordson administrative building today.

Last July, the Woodward Avenue Action Association revealed that a purchase agreement was in place for the Fordson office building, the executive parking garage and approximately three acres of vacant land, and in December, the organization announced that it had received commitments for the $550,000 in funding necessary. The sale was completed this past week, marking the first milestone along the way toward the buildings’ eventual preservation.

Per Deborah Schutt, association’s executive director, the next step is to secure the existing structures to prevent further vandalism and decay, then begin the lengthy process of site cleanup. Excluding any potential work on the land acquired (such as grading and paving for parking lots, useful during the Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise), Deborah estimates that $7.5 million worth of renovation will be required to turn the former Fordson office building and parking garage into a multi-use structure and gateway to the area’s rich automotive history.

The first floor of the former administrative building will serve as a welcome center, perhaps with changing displays, advising visitors of museums, tours and other area activities. To fund this visitor center, the building’s other three floors will be leased as office space, and potentially to a trade school, linking the building back to the days when the Henry Ford Trade School trained legions of workers on the Highland Park grounds. Deborah’s projections have the site opening in 2018, but she said the association has already received numerous inquiries from companies looking to lease office space in the historic building.

The Fordson office building and executive garage with the site’s most famous products.

Still, getting to that point will require a considerable amount of funding. While crowdsourcing did raise some of the $550,000 required to purchase the buildings and land, the net amount was less than eight percent of the purchase price, with the rest coming from organizations like the Michigan Department of Transportation, the Highland Park Tax Increment Finance Authority and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. Raising the $7.5 million necessary to renovate the buildings will require both an aggressive crowdsourcing campaign and, likely, generosity from corporate sponsors.

The buildings have been the subject of a study by Michigan’s Historic Preservation Office, a necessary step on the road to designating them a “Historic District” in the city of Highland Park. Such a designation would guarantee preservation, something that listing the buildings in National Register of Historic Places does not. There’s even talk of getting the structures listed with a World Heritage designation, giving them the same recognition as natural wonders like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and man-made creations like the Statue of Liberty. Though the association now owns two of the buildings remaining on the Highland Park site, Deborah is clear that the group’s focus is on preservation, not on acquiring additional real estate holdings.

For more information on the Woodward Avenue Action Association’s efforts, visit WoodwardAvenue.org.

While the effort to save a portion of the Willow Run assembly plant has come down to its final week, demolition crews have already torn down about half of the former Kaiser-Frazer and GM structure outside of Ypsilanti, Michigan, to make way for an autonomous vehicle research facility.

“Every single day big chunks are coming down,” Said Dennis Norton, director of the Michigan Aerospace Foundation and original founder of the Yankee Air Museum, which has so far raised $6.8 million of the $8 million necessary to purchase a fraction of the plant. “Now that the weather has warmed up, the demolition crews are going to move rapidly.”

Bulldozers arrived on the site to begin tearing down the 5-million-square-foot facility last fall after the RACER development trust – which took possession of the plant after GM shut down operations there in late 2010 – reached a deal last September with Walbridge Development to build a shared research and development center and test track for connected vehicles. According to Bill Callen, speaking for RACER Trust, demolition slowed down during the long and hard Michigan winter, but is now about 50 percent complete. “The demolition contractors know that the museum has an interest in that portion of the plant, so they’ve segregated that and are demolishing the rest,” Callen said.

Yankee Air Museum officials launched a campaign last year to raise $8 million to buy about 155,000 square feet of the plant, a portion that includes the end of the assembly line and the bay doors through which every completed B-24 bomber rolled out of the plant during World War II. Former GM chairman Bob Lutz stepped in to help the campaign, as did retired astronaut Jack Lousma, and RACER Trust worked with museum officials to push the deadline back multiple times last year. The current deadline of May 1 is the last that RACER has offered, but Norton said he is confident the museum will raise the final $1.2 million by then.

“I’m about 95 percent sure we’ll sign the purchase agreement by May 1,” Norton said. “That $8 million will take care of building two new walls to close up the section and to put in utilities like heat and a fire suppression system. It’ll be an almost new building when we’re done with it.”

Artist’s rendering of the Yankee Air Museum in the Willow Run bomber plant.

Built on land owned by Henry Ford to crank out B-24 Liberator bombers in 1941, the Albert Kahn-designed plant became the largest single industrial building under one roof. Once it ramped up to full production in late 1943, the so-called “Grand Canyon of the mechanized world” would produce a bomber per hour, along with a number of wood-bodied gliders.

After the war, Ford declined its option to buy the massive plant from the federal government, so the government – through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the War Assets Administration – ended up leasing, and eventually selling, Willow Run to the newly formed Kaiser-Frazer. Kaiser-Frazer converted Willow Run to automotive production and built cars there from June 1946 to July 1953 before selling the plant to General Motors for $26 million. GM used the plant to build Hydra-Matic transmissions and other powertrain components until December 2010, when it shed the property as part of its bankruptcy.

RACER, which obtained the 332-acre plant not long after, attempted to sell portions of the property to other industrial companies, but pointed to the massive plant as an impediment to finding new tenants and thus decided to tear it down last year. Not long after, RACER signed a contract with Walbridge to sell the property after demolition is complete.

Callen said that the demolition was slated to take a full year, but Norton said he believes that demolition will be complete by about mid-July.

UPDATE (2.May 2014): It looks like the Yankee Air Museum wasn’t able to raise the required $8 million to purchase the plant. As of this morning, the SavetheBomberPlant.org website noted that $7.23 million had been raised, with another $770,000 needed to reach the goal.

UPDATE (24.June 2014): The Yankee Air Museum, which has to date raised $7.5 million, is going ahead with the purchase agreement to buy 144,000 square feet of the plant. According to SavetheBomberPlant.org, closing should take place within the next few weeks.

Many automakers can make claims about their heritage and old-world craftsmanship, but few can back up those claims quite like the Morgan Motor Company. Not only does Morgan still produce a range of ash wood-framed sports cars by hand alongside three-wheelers that are remarkably similar to Morgan’s Runabouts of the 1930s, but it does so in a factory built by Morgan in 1914. Though the Morgan Motor Company celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2012, this year marks yet another milestone: the 100th anniversary of the Pickersleigh Road works.

In 1905, Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan (Harry to his friends, or simply H.F.S.) opened the Morgan & Company Garage and Motor Works on Worcester Road in Malvern Link, Worcestershire, England, in what was originally an automotive repair facility and automobile dealership. By 1909, H.F.S. Morgan had constructed his first three-wheeler, and one year later debuted the Morgan Runabout to the public at the Olympia Motorcycle Show in London. Though business was slow at first, increasing the seating capacity of the Runabout from one to two and changing from a tiller to a steering wheel significantly increased vehicle sales. Spurred by his success, H.F.S. formed the Morgan Motor Company as a private limited company in 1912, appointing his father, the Reverend H.G. Morgan, as chairman (and himself as managing director).

Sales continued to grow in the years preceding the First World War, and by late 1913, it became clear that the firm’s Worcester Road factory would soon run out of space. When a nearby parcel of farmland, owned by Earl Beauchamp, became available, its size and proximity to the Worcester Road plant proved to be the deciding factor, and H.F.S. purchased the acreage on Pickersleigh Road in Malvern Link. By the summer of 1914, a pair of factory buildings had risen from the soil, but the onset of World War I would prevent Morgan from moving its manufacturing operations.

When the war ended in 1918, the simplicity of Morgan’s Runabouts allowed the company to resume manufacturing almost immediately. The majority of manufacturing operations were transferred from Worcester Road to Pickersleigh Road, and it soon became apparent that more manufacturing space would be needed. Plans were made to enlarge the works on Pickersleigh Road, and the new expanded facility opened in October 1919.

Since that time, the Morgan Motor Company has introduced four-wheelers into its product mix, debuting the 4/4 (denoting four wheels and four cylinders) in 1936. Today, the company may utilize modern components (often from third-party suppliers), but Morgan automobiles are still built by hand, using techniques pioneered in the last century. In recognition of 100 years at Pickersleigh Road, Morgan will be releasing a series of short videos on its history this year. The first installment helps to put a face on those who build Morgan automobiles today, and while production may have evolved in the modern age, it’s apparent that none of the passion has been lost.